Letter from Bank
 

Hi everyone

I have seen a lot of references to getting a letter from your bank to help secure a rental on arrival.

What sort of letter is this? Is it common for banks to give out letters? What does it say? Do you just walk into your branch and ask for it?

Its just I have never heard of anything like this and was wondering how to get one. We want to make sure that we have absolutely everything that we need.

Thanks!!!

Re: Letter from Bank
 

Good question!!

I'd like to know this too.

What other references have you got?

Gill :D

Re: Letter from Bank
 

A BE urban myth. You do not need or want such a letter. Nobody in Australia will care about your previous credit history in a foreign country which relied upon a job which you no longer have!

Neither do you need references from previous employers or in fact anyone else at all.

The only thing which might be vaguely useful is maybe a no claims proof from your car insurance company but even that I have never had to show.

The point with rentals is your ability to pay the rent in Australia. If you have the funds in the bank from say a house sale, awesome. If you have a job in Australia, great. The landlord basically needs to know you can afford the rent now, and not how you did in the past.

Re: Letter from Bank
 

We thought the same about a bank ref...so went into our local Barclays who told us they do not supply such references, but as we will have a bit in the bank once we sell the house, we will just show bank statements to a letting agency if they want to see one, and hopefully this should do.
Dawn

Re: Letter from Bank
 

I work in a bank and have never heard of this.

All this stuff about “references” is crap, Landlords, Real Estates and Banks over here don’t care about any letters you have from previous Landlords, Real Estates or Banks as anyone can make up a letter on their home computer.

Anytime I have gone to rent a place here I have never needed anytime of letter. When I arrived back in Australia in October, I had no job, but just showed the real-estate my bank statement (from my Australian account), as long as they can see that you have the money to afford the bond and rent then they are happy.

Oh, and also any credit or credit problems you had in the UK don’t effect anything in Australia, and even your Australian credit report (good or bad) does not and cannot effect you getting a rental in Australia.

Mikey

Re: Letter from Bank
 

Hope this helps - before arriving in Melbourne we set up a transfer account with the Commonwealth Bank. They sent us a letter while in the UK to tell us where to go and who to see when we arrived to get our bank account and cards activated. When we went to the branch in the city we were allocated a Relationship Manager who is like a personal bank manager.
So far he has helped us by writing a reference letter to say who we are and that we have sufficient funds to pay for a rental, sorted out credit cards within a week of landing, put our savings in a high interest account, made sure that for our car insurance and house insurance we have paid less than any quote we came up with, never charged us any account fees, cashed UK Sterling cheques without charging fees, and the list goes on........

When we gave the reference letter to the agent he said the landlord will be pleased to see it as we had no Australian history or credit.

We got the first rental we went for - infact the landlord turned down 2 other applicants in our favour.

Amanda

Re: Letter from Bank
 

We were asked for a reference when we first applied for rentals as we didn't have any jobs to walk in to and they needed to know we had the means to pay. They were happy to accept a bank statement showing that we had funds available which would more than cover the rental for the next 12 months.